


it's a reasonable sacrifice

by amrita (rwbyfics)



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-15
Updated: 2015-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-14 19:15:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4576521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rwbyfics/pseuds/amrita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hope is a silly little thing that she cradles in her hands now. Hope is a blade that she will gladly fall onto.</p><p>Hope is a flame that she will defend with her life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's a reasonable sacrifice

Jasper worms her way into Lapis’s mind like an infection.

Being Malachite is uncomfortable, painful even, especially when Jasper’s impatience and rage starts to intrude on her own thoughts and feelings. The outline of her own body starts to bleed away as they sink further into the depths of the ocean. Lapis can’t help crying. She’s given up her own form, her own mind, perhaps even her own life for this; will it ever be enough to make up for her mistakes? She doesn’t deserve forgiveness, that much she knows.

Jasper’s angry enough to make the effects of fusion feel like real, human pain. A proper fusion is supposed to feel fulfilling and effortless -- like Garnet, a perfect amalgamation of Ruby and Sapphire, clinging to each other because the separation of their physical bodies was too much to bear -- but Lapis wants to tear herself away from Jasper as soon as they are bound closer and closer together.

Malachite screams, and the sound disappears into the surrounding water. She -- Jasper -- briefly regains most of Malachite’s power and fights to swim upwards, but Lapis drags them deeper down into the ocean, chaining her heart to Jasper’s on the slow descent down. They’d be together, here in this ugly prison of a body, rotting just like they deserved to. Jasper fights for dominance over Malachite’s mind, continuously trying to shove Lapis out of the stream of consciousness once she’s just about finished collecting her thoughts. Lapis tries to fight back, but Jasper’s brutish strength knows no apparent bounds.

Even in the mental wars she wages, she fights ruthless, with her teeth bared.

Lapis makes sure that the locks are secured on all four of Malachite’s limbs, and closes her eyes, floating away like a petal in the breeze, silently letting Jasper’s all consuming fury fill the empty cracks between their faulty, doomed connection.

******

Whenever she surfaces, she thinks of the Crystal Gems.

They’d been right, hadn’t they? Of course they were right. Steven was pure proof that the fight for Earth had been worth it after all; human and Gem coexistence could be harmonious and fruitful. It’s hard for her to think of how different her life would have been if she’d joined Rose so many centuries ago. She wouldn’t have become a mere ghost of a being, a home for someone else’s face, echoing back memories and splicing words into messages that only said half of what she actually meant.

She could have been happy.

She could have had a home. Lapis forces herself not to think of something as foolish and stubborn as the past. She’d been so young then, willing to fight for anything and anyone that could convince her to. All it took were the right string of words and then she was punch drunk and spinning, dizzy for blood.

Her attention snaps back to the present, where she lets Malachite’s power run stagnant. It isn’t often that she has full control over Malachite, and it won’t last long.

The longer that Jasper stays under the surface, the angrier she gets. Her thoughts bleed into Lapis’s, and they are raw and scorching and so, _so_ angry. She could burn down a nation, even a planet, if she was left to her own devices, Lapis thinks weakly. Jasper’s starting to swim upstream currents to wrest Malachite back from her grasp. Before Lapis goes under again, she thinks of the sun’s warmth kissing her skin, Steven’s bright, guileless smile boring into hers, the feeling of reasonless hope in her chest.

For the first time in a while, she hopes, she hopes, she hopes.

******

“You think you’re strong enough to beat me?! How dare you call yourself a Homeworld Gem, you… you spineless traitor?” Jasper demands, thundering through the pale morning calm of Lapis’s sense of self. “You are _weak_ , Lapis Lazuli. You will never be strong.”

No. Lapis has never been strong and she has long since accepted that she cannot change a matter of the soul. She may never be a true warrior or feel half the amount of conviction that Jasper and Peridot feel for the Homeworld’s preservation. But she is patient. And she can wait as long as it takes here, at the bottom of the sea, where the sun refuses to warm the water even for a fleeting moment. There’s enough time to fill the oceans three over with, and Lapis won’t complain for any minute of them.

She won’t defeat Jasper. She’ll starve her out. Lapis Lazuli has been pinned to a cross with her legs bent, but as long as she can rise up now and then to breathe her lungs full and think of life, she has enough. Jasper overflows with misdirected vengeance and a fire for blood, but underneath it all, she’s hurt. Lapis was hurt once, just like her, but she was healed at the hands of a child too wise for his years, far older than his age.

Hope is a silly little thing that she cradles in her hands now. Hope is a blade that she will gladly fall onto. Hope is a flame that she will defend with her life.

Jasper screams at her, tells her exactly how she will strangle Lapis once they are free, how her hands will fit perfectly at the base of her throat, the precise process of how her bones being ground to dust, the exact punishments that awaited filthy traitors like herself, the way that Jasper will rip her sanity to shreds first and then her soul and then her body last.

Lapis closes her eyes and floats.

She tunes out Jasper’s voice and goes down her list of her hopes. She hopes to see the rest of Earth in all its entirety. She hopes to walk through small Steven Universe’s town under a hot, muggy summer sun. She hopes to shake her friend’s hand. She hopes to give him an apology, a real, proper one, face to face, to say the words and feel regret and pain. She hopes that he will accept it. She hopes, she hopes, she hopes.

She waits.  


End file.
